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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Does your boyfriend ever put his tools away after finishing a mechanical project?

Is his desk clean?

Is he strong enough to lift a feather duster and whip the vacuum cleaner around?

Having a mountain of tabs open is the equivalent of not putting your tools away, keeping your desk tidy or keeping your house clean.

People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy. Millions of tabs open might give the impression of 'genius at work', but do the deliverables get delivered?

This might not be a popular opinion, however, after having to tidy up my dad's estate (he never put tools away and his computer had billions of tabs open), I have formed my own conclusions on this.

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I hat tip your bravery for pointing out an indulgence likely common among readers. Guilty as charged right here. But.

The comparison doesn't really hold. This is not like an untidy workbench. Modern browsers don't incur a significant penalty for having hundreds or even thousands of tabs. There are workflows that benefit from Never Closing, and I'm glad to see browsers now don't turn into a nipple bar to expose me.

Indeed after years and dozens of times where someone looks over my shoulder to see many tabs and abandons our topic to engage in Shame Time, I am fully innoculated to their barbs and feel it says more about the person pointing than myself. I manage to engage in a world with noise. Some people can't. The worst of them reach for grand overarching conclusions, as you have done here.

I also sometimes leave the evening dishes for the morning cleaning session.

Too much tidying up is procrastination, so hat tip for you doing the dishes in the morning, that makes sense.

I have recently learned a lot about highly effective people and tidiness is a common trait, even with browser tabs.

For most of my life I have been working with far too many tabs open, however, I do have this habit of bookmarking all tabs monthly, to then go to about twenty tabs across (the forever tabs) to then 'close all tabs to the right'.

You would be amazed at how few of those 'vital' tabs get reopened.

Each of them is a promise to one's future self to do something or read something, and rarely does one's future self do that.

I can relate to the pursuit of tidiness. It is satisfying to purge. I makes more room for the things that are neglected amongst the distraction. What's left over on my desk from yesterday's adventures is best cleared away. My patch cables on the synthesizer are often best pulled even if I end up putting them back in place.

I just don't see open tabs as burdensome, any more than my Steam backlog. If I get to them I do, if I don't, I don't. I also don't defrag my SSD and when I reboot my RAM starts fresh.

Tidiness and entropy are always at tension, and it's often best to let the balance be.

> People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy.

Not my experience at all.

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